Blend Aha! user accounts with Idea portal user accounts

As a product manager, I love the concept of using the Ideas portal to improve internal transparency and serve as a submission point for all features, bugs, general ideas, etc - the current permissions structure makes that a bit cumbersome and confusing. I have a few suggestion around this:

At the very minimum, I would suggest that a current Aha! user be able to use their normal credentials to log in to an idea portal from the direct hyperlink.

Even better would be the merging of Aha! user and Ideas user credentials, perhaps even merging the SSO (google) functionality.

I personally see no value in having separate requirements/credentials for the core application and the ideas portal provided that there is a decently designed/implemented user management portal. To me, the ideas portal is clean and is a key differentiator - I'll be interested to see if others agree and up-vote this.

Admin Response

Thank you for the request. While we can understand the desire to blend the accounts together across Aha! and idea portals, this has been designed as such for security reasons. By keeping these areas separate, this can ensure the highest degree of security for your accounts.

If you would like to only login once, we recommend that a user log into Aha! first, and then access the ideas portal.

Hi everyone -- all Aha! users *are* portal users. If they have rights to an Aha! product, they can automatically have access to any ideas portals that contain that product. The only caveat is that they must log into Aha! first.

The confusion my group has had has been when an employee signs up for a portal account, then down the road is given a full account. It's vague how the two usernames/passwords interact, and especially confusing when their ideas login is cached/saved - in this case they'll receive fairly vague errors about needing to login through a different Aha login portal.

Would be nice if we could have the option to reuse the SSO from the main Aha account SSO for any idea portal we create. So in the idea portal SSO tab, you could pick the Aha account SSO to use for auth on the portal. My struggle at the moment is to have our security team create a bunch of SSOs for each new idea portal that someone might want, or giving stakeholders complicated steps (login to account page first, then go to the idea portal link).

I'm imagining a "Use Aha account SSO settings" box in the idea portal SSO tab (accessible to account admins only). Seems like it could work like this if that box was checked: